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Is the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle worth all the effort? It’s a question we ask ourselves every time we lace up our running shoes at the crack of dawn, resist the urge to have a second helping and sip on a single glass of wine when everyone else is freely imbibing.

According to a new longevity study by Ottawa researchers, the payback on all that extra effort is huge. Choosing to live a healthy life will result in a longer one by a whopping 17.9 years.

The study used a unique algorithm to analyze data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (distributed annually to Canadians to collect information related to their health status) to determine how unhealthy behaviours affect the long-term health of Canadians. It also calculated the flip side of the coin: the impact healthy living has on longevity.

Smoking, drinking, inactivity and a poor diet were the four unhealthy habits included in the study, with each of the 77,399 Canadian respondents asking to account for how often and how much they smoked, drank alcohol, exercised and ate fruit and vegetables. They were then followed for an extended period, with deaths accounted for.

The goal of the study was to create a tool to measure how unhealthy behaviours affect longevity, but in doing so the researchers uncovered some pretty significant data, including the cumulative effect of our bad habits. Fifty per cent of all deaths are related to smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet and alcohol consumption, the result of which is about six years of life expectancy lost. Also revealed is how each of the four unhealthy behaviours affected life expectancy.

“I’m always caught off guard about how big a burden unhealthy behaviour is,” said Dr. Doug Manuel, lead author of the study and senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital, professor at the University of Ottawa and a senior core scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.

Smoking has the most effect on health, causing 26 per cent of all deaths in the cohort. Inactivity was a close second, leading to 24 per cent of all reported mortalities. Poor diet accounted for 12 per cent of deaths, and overconsumption of alcohol resulted in 0.4 per cent.

As for which behaviour had the largest impact on longevity, smoking was the leading risk factor for men, reducing life expectancy by 3.1 years. Among women, physical inactivity had the most significant impact on life expectancy, resulting in a loss of three years.

The exercise equation was determined by tallying the amount of leisure time activity that took place in the previous month as reported by the survey respondents and scoring it based on type, duration and frequency of exercise.

As for the researchers’ definition of a healthy lifestyle, they suggest health is best preserved by non-smokers who drink a light to moderate amount of alcohol per week and are physically active with a healthy diet — habits only three per cent of the Canadian population maintain. An unhealthy lifestyle is that of a heavy smoker and drinker who rarely exercises and eats a nutritiously poor diet.

What comes across loud and clear in this study is the power of prevention. It not only confirms the benefits of making healthy lifestyle choices, it also provides motivation for making those small but important changes in how you live your life.

What’s also interesting is the impact that physical activity has on longevity, increasing the time playing with your grandchildren by about three years. Yet despite this and other well-publicized benefits, Canadians are still spending too much time sitting and not enough time moving.

“Physical activity is really at the same (level of risk) as smoking,” said Manuel, who laments that we haven’t had the same success getting people to exercise regularly as we have decreasing the number of smokers.

That’s too bad, as it doesn’t take going from a couch potato to a marathoner to add years to your life. In fact, those first few steps are the most effective when it comes to increasing longevity. Study after study has proved that the biggest boost in health benefits is realized in the transition from non-exerciser to moderate exerciser.

As a public health physician, Manuel says most of his patients claim they want to be more active, so motivation isn’t the problem. Rather, it’s our focus on increasing the amount of leisure time activity that’s flawed. Manuel suggests that communities and the workplace offer more opportunities to be active outside of that small window referred to as leisure time. More cycling and walking paths to get to and from work and greater opportunities to incorporate physical activity in the workplace are two examples of positive changes.

“We need to talk collectively on how to make it easier to be physically active,” he said.

As for how to determine your own longevity, Manuel and his team created an online life expectancy calculator (projectbiglife.ca) that allows you to enter your own lifestyle data to project not just the length of your life, but your age based on your lifestyle. Go ahead and give it a try, and see how your habits affect your life expectancy. Then try it again, this time increasing the amount of weekly physical activity, and see how many more years you gain. Then use that knowledge as motivation to get off the couch and into the gym.

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The power of prevention: Life expectancy tool weighs the burdens of behaviour

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